Interesting interview in Guardian

Good interview in today's Guardian in which Nathalie explains her character's motivation with exquisite simplicity:


Nathalie Baye: 'Happiness is doing a job you love'

She pretty much defined French cinema in the 70s and 80s: intimate, kooky, charming. Now Nathalie Baye can add 'properly funny' to her CV

Jon Henley
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 4 August 2011 22.20 BST
Article history

In Nathalie Baye's new film, there are lots of funny scenes, but this one's especially good: she hobbles fantastically through the streets of Sète one broiling summer morning, in bare feet and nightie, tailing a young man who has just deposited a love letter in her mailbox. (The love letter wasn't actually intended for her, or at least it was, but it isn't a real love letter. And the young man isn't supposed to have delivered it, still less been seen doing so. But more of that later.)

Anyway, there's one of the undisputed greats of French cinema, 63 years of age, 80-odd films to her name, an actor who has worked with Truffaut and Godard, Pialat, Chabrol and Tavernier, who has won four Césars and been nominated for half a dozen more, bent double, dodging into doorways, dancing from foot to foot on the hot paving stones. "They were baking," she says, "really hot. I had little transparent stick-on plastic soles, and even then it hurt." She's making a complete, utter, abject and undignified fool of herself.

We're talking in a small lounge off the lobby of a plush but discreet hotel near St Sulpice; the sofa, the concierge says, where Baye usually likes to receive her interviewers. She arrives bang on time in a light summer trenchcoat, jeans and striped top, suffering from a cold but otherwise in high spirits. That familiar, slightly off-centre beauty, completely natural, and entirely unintimidating. She has almost as many questions for me as I have for her. Not your average cinematic interviewee, not at all.

Along with Miou-Miou and the Isabelles Huppert and Adjani, Baye pretty much defined the French cinema of the 1970s and 80s: intimate, kooky, charming. Since a marginally quieter spell in the mid-90s, she has become – modest, concentrated, imbued always with a deep common sense and rarely less than thoroughly watchable – what she now readily describes as "a part of the family" in France.

You certainly don't imagine any other French star of her generation hopping excruciatingly through the streets in broad daylight in her nightie. In truth, you don't imagine Baye doing it either, but it's not so surprising. It's a measure of the remarkable lengths to which she has gone to avoid being pigeonholed, of the concentration and persistence with which she sets about the task of becoming her characters, that seeing her as a frantic, lovestruck 60-something seems not in the least unlikely. Plus, she's touching, and properly funny.

In Beautiful Lies, Baye plays Maddy, mother to Emilie. Jean, who does the odd jobs at the hair salon Emilie runs, is in love with his boss, but dare not show it. He writes her a passionate but anonymous love letter. Despairing of ever seeing Maddy recover her joie de vivre, Emilie copies the letter word for word (bar the name at the top), and sends it to her mother. Thus begins a cascade of misunderstandings, deceits and reverses worthy of a modern-day Marivaux. It's deftly constructed, beautifully acted and elegantly witty.

"I don't like smooth," Baye says. "One-dimensional, single-note doesn't interest me. I like contradictions. She's quite borderline, Maddy. She was her sculptor husband's muse, and now he's left her for a younger model, and she's wallowing in her unhappiness. Then she gets this letter, and she's alive again. Then she realises she's part of someone else's game. She's humiliated, which turns to cruelty and revenge, until finally she redeems herself, with generosity. She's the kind of character I like."

It's also the kind of project Baye likes. For starters, it's a true ensemble piece, delightfully played with Audrey Tautou (of Amélie fame) and Sami Bouajila. In fact, very few of the films that Baye has done could properly be described as vehicles for her. "I like acting with other people," she says. "I like the circulation of other actors, the knowledge that the better they are, the better we all are together, the better the film will be. I'm much, much more interested in a small part in a good project than a big part in a bad one."

It's directed by Pierre Salvadori, a master of the modern French comedy (2006's Priceless was his last), whose work Baye had long admired. "He has a real signature," she says. "His films are serious, but he puts those ideas across through comedy. I like that, very much. He also writes the most wonderful dialogue. And he was once an actor, so he has this real rapport with actors. A perfectionist, very demanding, but this notion of the importance of pleasure. The salvation of laughter."

The daughter of two determinedly bohemian artists, Baye was born in Normandy in 1948. From her parents, she says, she inherited "an appreciation of beautiful things, and the ability to observe", but also – in opposition – "an overriding need for neatness and order at home, and for punctuality. And I was brought up with very few rules, so that what rules there were I really respected. I was sensible and well-behaved, actually. Certainly compared to some of my schoolfriends."

She trained first as a classical dancer, and at 17 spent a year at dance school in New York, while working as an au pair for a family with whom she is still in affectionate touch. Back in France, she accompanied a friend to an acting class in Paris one day and, invited to try for herself, "instantly felt at home, in my element. I fell in love with this profession." From her dance days, she retains "a certain ease with my body, a lack of embarrassment, that has been very helpful. Many actors find that the hardest thing, simply being. Inhabiting their bodies."

Her break came straight after the Paris Conservatory, when Truffaut picked her – on the second reading, he hadn't liked the first – to play the script girl Joelle in Day for Night. It was "obviously the great chance of my life. You get maybe two or three like that in a lifetime, and you have to seize them. But it sets the bar high. Once you've worked with a director like that, it makes you want to do it always. I've been privileged in that way, certainly. Privileged to be able to choose. And I think the way to perceive an artist is in the observation of their choices."

It's hard, in such an extensive filmography, to pick highlights, but pressed, Baye does her best. Sauve Qui Peut (la Vie) with Godard in 1979: "A good film, really a good film. And God knows, he's made some bad ones." The 1982 arthouse hit The Return of Martin Guerre, opposite Gérard Depardieu: "Because it was a true tale, because we were filming in the place where it actually happened. She was an extraordinary woman and it was an extraordinary story."

Bob Swaim's internationally acclaimed crime thriller La Balance that same year, which won her first best actress César. The second was for Xavier Beauvois's The Young Lieutenant, in 2006, of which she's also very proud – as she is of Une Liaison Pornographique, by the little-known Belgian director Frédéric Fonteyne. The hit romcom Vénus Beauté (Institut) effectively relaunched a career that had looked, briefly, to be faltering. Her big venture into Hollywood was Spielberg's 2002 Catch Me If You Can. "The sheer scale of the thing, compared with France. The amount of kit, the personnel. Amazing."

Professionally, Baye admires Helen Mirren ("quite extraordinary – film, theatre, television ... such intelligence") and Tilda Swinton ("great originality, enormous simplicity"). Her favourite film, if she really has to choose, and purely because "it always cheers me up", is, surprisingly, Some Came Running, Vincente Minnelli's 1958 caper with Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine. She likes actors who give so much you can't actually see they're acting. Not those who do what she dismissively calls "un numéro": put on a performance.

Outside acting, she is known in France for her four-year relationship in the 1980s with the indestructible Gallic rocker Johnny Hallyday. They have a daughter, the actor Laura Smet ("Thankfully, she's very good. It would have been a catastrophe if she wasn't,") and remain on good terms; the three of them are meeting up in August. Nonetheless, the Hallyday years are why Baye today is self-effacing about her private life: "I hate that whole celebrity thing. It's dirtying and destabilising. You lose your self in something that's nothing to do with you. That's why it's sad, these kids who want to be famous. Fame isn't happiness. Happiness is doing a job you love."

That job Baye loves continues to treat her well; she gets eight or 10 scripts a month, and is currently working on a TV series about the behind-the-scenes world of French politics. She's considering directing, in a modest way. And she's fine with being 63. "There's a song," she says, "by Michel Berger: 'Tu comprendras quand tu seras plus jeune.' You'll understand when you're younger. That's the trick about ageing: you need to somehow become lighter at the same time. In harmony with your years, and your desires. I am, I hope."